Fresh Data on German Political Parties

Published:Rabochaya PravdaNo. 3 July 16, 1913.

      Signed:V. I..

      Published according to theRabochaya Pravdatext.Source:Lenin
	  Collected Works,

      Progress Publishers,1977,

      Moscow,Volume 19,

      pages268-271.Translated:The Late George HannaTranscription\Markup:R. CymbalaPublic Domain:Lenin Internet Archive

      (2004).You may freely copy, distribute,
	display and perform this work; as well as make derivative and
	commercial works. Please credit “Marxists Internet
	Archive” as your source.•README

TheGerman statistical office has published some
interesting data on the 1912 parliamentary (Reichstag) elections. It is
particularly instructive to compare the strength of the various parties in
thetownsandvillages.

Germanstatistics, like those of most European states, regard all
inhabited centres having less than 2,000 inhabitants as villages, unlike
Russia which still retains the senseless, arbitrary distinction made by
officials and policemen, by which certain inhabited centres are “called”
towns irrespective of the number of inhabitants.

Germanstatistics regard inhabited centres with a population of between
2,000 and 10,000 as small towns and those with 10,000 or more inhabitants
as big towns.

Thereproves to be a strikingly regular correlation between theprogressive natureof a party (“progressive” in the broadest
economic and political sense) and theincreasein the strength of
that party in thetownsand bigger inhabited centres in general.

Fourgroups of political parties in Germany stand out clearly in this
respect:

1)Social-Democrats—theonly completely progressive and, in the best
sense of the word, “popular” mass party of wage-workers;

2)ProgressivePeople’s Party—a petty-bourgeois democratic party,
something like our
Trudoviks[1](only under conditions of a fully bourgeois and not a feudal society);

3)NationalLiberals—the party of the big bourgeoisie, the German
Octobrist-Cadet party;

4)allconservative parties, Black-Hundred landowners, clericals,
reactionary urban petty bourgeois and peasants(anti-Semites, “the Centre”, i.e., Catholics, conservatives proper,
Poles, and so on).

Universalfranchise exists in Germany. The above table shows clearly
that the German village, the German peasantry (like those ofallEuropean, constitutional, civilised countries) are still, to
the present day,almost completelyen slaved by the landowners and
priests, spiritually and politically.

Inthe German villages almost three-fifths (58.6%) of the votes go to
the conservative, i.e., landowner and priest, parties! Everywhere in Europe
the peasantwasrevolutionary when he fought against the feudals,
the serf-owners and landowners. Once the peasant had obtained his freedom
and a little piece of land he, as a general rule,made his peacewith the landowners and priests and became a reactionary.

Thedevelopment of capitalism, however, begins in its turn to pull the
peasant out of the embraces of reaction and leads him to the
Social-Democrats. In 1912, the German Social-Democrats hadalreadyobtainedalmost one-fifth(19%) of all rural votes.

Thepolitical picture in the German countryside today is, therefore,
the following.One-fifthfor the Social-Democrats,one-fifthfor the more or less “liberal” bourgeoisie andthree fifthsfor the landowners and priests. There is still quite
a lot to be done for the political education of the country side. By
ruining the small peasant and putting the screw on him, capitalism, one
might say, is knocking reactionary prejudices out of his head by force.

Thereis already a different picture in the small towns; the
Social-Democrats have overtaken the liberal bourgeoisie (35.8% of the votes
as compared with 27%) but have not quite caught up with the conservatives,
who obtained 36.4% of the votes. The small towns are the stronghold of the
urban petty bourgeoisie engaged mainly in commerce and manufacturing. The
petty bourgeoisie waver most of all and do not give a stable majority
either to the conservatives, or to the socialists or to the liberal
bourgeoisie.

inthe big towns there has been a Social-Democratic victory. The
Social-Democrats have a following ofhalfthe population (49.3% of
the votes), as many as the conservatives and liberals combined
(15.6+13.8+20=49.4%). The conservatives here are supported by onlyone-fifthof the population, the liberal bourgeoisie bythree-tenthsand the Social-Democrats by ahalf. If we
were to take the biggest towns there would be an incomparably wider
predominance of Social-Democracy.

Weknow that towns in all modern states and even in Russia grow more
rapidly than villages, that the towns are centres of the economic,
political and spiritual life of the people and are the chief vehicles of
progress. The predominance of Social-Democracy in the towns gives a clear
demonstration of its significance as the party of the advanced masses.

OfGermany’s population of 65,000,000 only 25,900,000 people were
living in rural areas in 1912; 12,300,000 were living in small towns and
26,800,000 in the bigger towns. In recent decades, since Germany became a
completely capitalist state, relatively free and possessing a stable
constitution and universal franchise, the urban population has grown more
rapidly than that of the countryside. In 1882, only 18,900,000 of the
45,000,000 population lived in towns, i.e., 41.8%; in 1895 the total
population was 52,000,000, the urban population 26,000,000, i.e., 49.8%; in
1907 out of the 62,000,000 population, 36,000,000 lived in towns, i.e.,
58.1%. The population of the biggest towns, those with 100,000 or more
inhabitants, was in the same years 3,000,000 7,000,000 and 12,000,000
respectively, i.e., 7.4%, 13.6% and 19.1% of the total population. In the
course of twenty-five years the entire population has increased by 36.5%,
theurban population by 89.6% and the population of the biggest towns by
254.4%.

Finally,it is interesting to note that the purely bourgeois parties in
present-day bourgeois Germany are supported by aminorityof the
population. In 1912, the Social-Democrats obtained in the whole of Germanymore than one-thirdof the total number of votes cast (34.8%), the
conservatives (mainly the landowners and priests) somewhat less thantwo-fifths(38.3%), and all the liberal-bourgeois partiesonly
one-quarterof the votes cast (25.9%).

Howis this to be explained? Why is it that in bourgeois Germany, in a
country in which capitalism is developing with particular rapidity, more
than sixty years after the revolution (the bourgeois revolution of 1848),
landowners’ and clerical parties and not purely bourgeois political parties
predominate?

Thekey to the explanation of this phenomenon was provided by Karl Marx
as far back as 1848—the German bourgeoisie, frightened of the
independence of the proletariat and seeing that the workers were using
democratic institutionsfor themselvesand against the
capitalists, turned its back on democracy, shamefully betrayed the liberty
that it had previously defended and began to fawn upon the landowners and
clericals.[2]We know that since 1005 the Russian bourgeoisie has been
developing these slavish political inclinations and these slavish political
ideas more zealously than the German bourgeoisie.

[1]Trudoviks,Trudovik group—also known as
the peasant group; a group of petty-bourgeois democrats formed in April 1906 by
peasant deputies to the First Duma. They demanded the abolition of all
social-estate and national restrictions, democratisation of the rural and urban
local government bodies and universal suffragein elections to the State Duma. Their agrarian programme was based on the
Narodnik principle of equalitarian land tenure and envisaged the formation
of a national land fund to include state, crown and monastery lands, as
well as private holdings exceeding the area that could be tilled by the
owner’s family, with payment of compensation for land alienated from
private owners. The implementation of the land reform was to he entrusted
to local peasant committees.

[2]Leninrefers here to an article in theNeue Rheinische Zeitung“The Berlin Debates on the Revolution” (“Die Berliner Debatte \"uber die
Revolution”) (Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels,Werke, Bd. V, Dietz
Verlag, Berlin, 1959).